Subjective Evaluation of Restaurant Acoustics in a Virtual Sound Environment

Many restaurants have smooth rigid surfaces made of wood, steel, glass, and concrete. This often results in a lack of sound absorption. Such restaurants are notorious for high sound noise levelsduring service that most owners actually desire for representing vibrant eating environments,although surveys report that noise complaints are on par with poor service. This study investigatedthe relation between objective acoustic parameters and subjective evaluation of acoustic comfort atfive restaurants in terms of three parameters: noise annoyance, speech intelligibility, and privacy. Ateach location, questionnaire surveys were filled in by customers, acoustic parameters weremeasured, and recordings of restaurant acoustic scenes were obtained with a 64-channel sphericalarray. The acoustic scenes were reproduced in a virtual sound environment (VSE) with 64loudspeakers placed in an anechoic room, where listeners performed subjective evaluation of noiseannoyance and privacy and a speech intelligibility test for each restaurant noise background. It wasfound that survey and listening test results agreed well and that, in the VSE, speech receptionthresholds were similar for the five reproduced restaurant backgrounds.